Listen to this article

What do you think?

Please tell us why (optional)

This article is from today’s FT Opinion email. Sign up to receive a daily digest of the big issues straight to your inbox.

Robert Mueller has dropped his first (and possibly not final) precision-guided bomb on the Trump White House. The special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has indicted Paul Manafort and Richard Gates, the US president’s former campaign manager and his assistant, with crimes mostly related to work in Ukrainian politics. Both have pleaded not guilty. If this was not shocking enough, another campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, was indicted for lying to the FBI about his links to Russia. It is a tangled web that will take a lot of effort to unravel.

But, as we say in an FT View editorial, none of Mr Mueller’s indictments is proof that the Trump campaign used intelligence provided by Russia to discredit Hillary Clinton. What we do know is that the investigation has ample reason to exist, there is plenty more work to be done and it should not be interfered with. President Trump may well try to oust Mr Mueller. And if he tries, it will be over to Congress, where the president has few friends, to ensure it does not happen. Either way, if the president attempts this, he risks plunging America into a constitutional crisis.

As well as following where the Manafort, Gates and Papadopoulos indictments will go, attention will turn to who else Mr Mueller is investigating. Edward Luce argues that Michael Flynn, Mr Trump’s former national security adviser, and Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, are possible future targets. Edward says there is no doubt about what Mr Mueller is aiming to prove: that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Who knows at this stage whether he will succeed, but he is pursuing every available lead carefully and diligently.

Catalonia and the EU: Gideon Rachman argues in his column that Spain’s constitutional crisis is another challenge to the EU’s future. Whereas membership was once a safe space from past disputes and illiberal politics, Spain, Britain, Italy, Poland, Greece and most of central Europe are all deviating dramatically from what used to be the European norm.

Dangers of direct democracy: Janan Ganesh says in his column that the decline of representative democracy threatens the fundamental way democracies are governed. There is no folk memory in Britain, for example, of a nation losing its mind to endless referendums.

Westminster sex scandals: The tide of sexual harassment allegations in British politics is rising rapidly. I’ve argued that this could turn into a full-blown scandal and become as consequential for the reputation of MPs as the 2008 expenses scandal.

What you’ve been saying

“Sir, Simon Knapp (Letters, October 26) is correct to say that opinions on Brexit are unlikely to change. Voters won’t easily admit “we were misled; we were wrong”. Confirmatory bias is slow to be displaced by buyer’s remorse. However, what might galvanise a turn in public sentiment is if one or more of the leading Leave advocates publicly recanted or admitted that Brexit turns out not to be worth the bother. The chance of this is slim, but it could gild rather than blight a political career.”

“The real policy problem is not the false choice between achieving an inflation target and a financial stability target. It is the fact that there is no target for financial stability. Financial crises are very costly but there is no agreement on the optimal frequency of crises. Society pays a heavy price when the supply of core financial services to households and companies dries up but there is no agreement on what exactly constitutes a core service and therefore what markets policymakers need to protect . . . It’s high time the politicians gave the policymakers a target to aim for.”